A simple title maybe, but this is a splendid evocation of the rich history and enormous variety of artistic endeavour inherent in the Caribbean. The core element features a Gallery of Artworks from the last seventy years embracing classic work from the early modern period to cutting edge contemporary innovation.
Such is its breadth and scale of scholarship, this is a book which will be appreciated far beyond the realms of gallery goers and art buffs - students, professionals and casual observers alike will be inspired by what is bound to become an important source of reference.
Forty artists have been selected by the authors, British born Anne Walmsley and the Guyanese Stanley Booth who are both patently well qualified to offer authoritative judgement and detailed examinations of paintings, sculpture, installations, bas relief, ceramics, photographs and drawings.
The second half of the book is an in depth study of the historical background extending from 5000BC up to 1500AD, the “discovery” and colonial era of 1500-1900 and culminating in the current modern day period, with a fascinating insight as to how cultural development and politics have affected artistic awareness and practice. This is an eye-opening tour de force in every sense of the phrase, the authors bringing new perspective and understanding to some of the Caribbean’s most celebrated artists and their work. It must have been a labour of love on all counts.
Concise and easy to read, incredibly detailed biographies also add substance to the canvases and pieces depicted. Several icons of modern art are represented like Cuba’s Wifredo Lam and the incomparable Albert Huie’s “Crop Time” but there are also lesser known practitioners from the smaller territories. Huie was a founding father of the Jamaica School of Art and died in 2010 aged eighty. Peter Minshall’s “Man Crab” from the 1983 Trinidad Carnival is an unforgettable vision for those who witnessed it (your reviewer did), and it’s rightly featured here as a groundbreaking large scale kinetic sculpture worn and articulated by a single performer. As the publication’s chief advisor and collaborator Chistopher Cozier observes: “as it crossed the Savannah stage, to be an artist began to mean something again in this society.”
Brilliantly illustrated throughout, the book’s cover is a wraparound photograph of Trinidadian Carlisle Chang’s vibrantly arresting mural “The Inherent Nobility of Man”, a complex portrayal of the country’s Arawak, East Indian and African heritage commissioned for Piarco International airport in 1962, then crassly destroyed fifteen years later by an expansion project. It seems churlish to nit-pick, the glossary, bibliography and timelines are good but the book lacks an index and comes in softback - a hard cover, larger scale version would have been more fitting for such a marvellous tome which is surely destined to become a companion volume to that other eponymous offering, Veerle Poupeye’s Caribbean Art in 1998.
Available at www.newbeaconbooks.co.uk priced £20.
